Wednesday

Oracle 11g Database

Oracle launched version 11g of its database with 475+ new technology features. Oracle 11g for LINUX will be released in upcoming months.Oracle 10g was launched 4 years ago; Release 2 of 10g came out 2 years ago. Newer version can build data links between different kinds of systems, whether Microsoft or Oracle databases, and Microsoft Excel files.

The new database includes an advanced feature, Real Application Testing, which captures a workload snapshot of an Oracle 10g production system and runs it on a new installation of 11g. The feature is expected to help users migrate applications to the new database with less effort than previous migrations.

If a user wants to change a database in current situation, he has to create a regression test suite. But with the new Oracle feature, the user can capture a peak workload, move it to 11g, and confirm that the new system will handle the task without errors, failures or performance problems.

Oracle gives customers the option of offloading secondary work, such as drafting reports from the database, to their standby, disaster recovery systems. The feature, Oracle Data Guard, lets customers use hot standby systems for reporting, backup, testing, and other non-mission critical tasks without jeopardizing the system's ability to weigh in as the primary system in the event of a disaster. The feature makes disaster recovery systems more cost effective.

Oracle is following the lead of Microsoft's SQL Server by building more business intelligence capabilities into the database. Users can direct their SQL queries to data cubes, an online analytical processing [OLAP] view of data from more than one dimension. Data cubes, for example, are useful for examining sales reports month by month or quarter by quarter.

Oracle's new OLAP features take business intelligence from a specialized niche into a much broader market. There was no conflict between the addition of business intelligence to the core product and Oracle's offering of Essbase and other products from its acquisition of Hyperion because they remained a separate business intelligence engine outside the database.

Another new feature is faster parsing of XML files as binary XML, or XML text reduced to the ones and zeros of a binary format. Oracle 11g's ability to handle binary XML gives users an option of storing and retrieving it with faster performance. Binary XML has to be converted back to text, however, before users can read and edit it.

Oracle 11g adds encryption and compression for storing large objects, usually unstructured data represented by a medical image, data on a three-dimensional object, or PowerPoint slides. Oracle Fast Files treats such objects as files in a file system and can store and retrieve them from the database more quickly than Oracle 10g.

Website quality will be improving a lot when these kind of features available in the database. These new features can help the data request and response from server quickly. User will feel the quality of website one step higher when compare with the previous version of database.